Over RAW again, please your advise.

Hello all,

It can be known that I´m not the biggest fan of working in RAW as I have said that here before. All the fuzz for a very slight gain in quality, at least for many cases. However, of course I know that particularly in clear skies an improvement is achievable when shooting in RAW.

That was the reason I shot a series in RAW+JPEG on a very sunny day, to make sure I always had all the original file-information. One of the images is here, presented in 4 stadia of processing.

no 000:

the original jpeg file. The sky is worn out for a great deal, so I wanted to bring more detail in the high lighted areas, the clouds.

no 001:

the processed jpeg file. I processed the jpeg-file by reducing the highlights in the image. I had to go to the very left end of the scale to reduce it to this level. That forced me to do some extra adjustment on the shadow-side.

no 002:

the processed RAW file, converted to jpeg. I have processed the RAW-file in ViewNX2 (Nikon) and brought the ´details in hightlights´ slider to 50 (middle of the scale) to reach this level of detailing in the clouds. But to be honest I don´t like the grey edges around the clouds that appeared when processing it to this level. It was not there in real life.

no 003:

again the processed RAW file, but with less processing than no 002. Because of disliking the grey edges I processed it once more with adding just as little detail in the highlights that the grey edges stayed away (about 13 on the scale). But that didn´t do much difference to the image compared to the first processed jpeg-image.

So my questions:
-am I doing something wrong?
-do I need other software that handles the info in the RAW file better?
-is RAW less relevant than many people say it is?

This last question comes up because I think many people do what the camera already does (converting to jpeg) and a lot think they do it better, wich is not always true IMO. In this case I find myself not being able to produce a better jpeg from RAW myself than the camera does.

Thanks for your comments,
H.

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Happy photographing!